Development of a cocoa beans batch dryer

Komolafe, C.A and Adejumo, A.O.D and Awogbemi, O. and Adeyeye, A.D. Development of a cocoa beans batch dryer. American Journal of Engineering Research.

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Abstract

A cocoa beans batch dryer of 25kg wet capacity was designed, constructed and evaluated using wood as fuel material. It consists of four major parts namely; drying platform, drying chamber, heating duct (flue) and air holes. The heated air cocoa batch dryer used in the evaluation was successful in drying 5cm deep thin layer of cocoa beans from initial moisture content of 80.01% (db) to 7.49% (db) in 7 hours of continuous drying at drying temperature between 61.30C and 66.7 0C. The even drying efficiencies ranges between 72.3% to 92.9%. Drying efficiency were observed to increase with increase in batch mass . Hence, adopting the dryer will help in boosting cocoa production for agricultural advancement of the country

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